3.2 Connect: Industrial Gateway to Cloud Demo

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. My name is Adrian Fernandez, and welcome to another episode of Connect. Today, we're bringing on Sai to talk a little bit about a new software product that we're introducing into this employing platform. So Sai, do you want to give a quick introduction to what we're introducing to developers today?
Sure. Hey guys. Today, we're going to talk about Industrial Gateway, which enables taking sensors which don't have access to internet to the cloud. To do this, we have launched a new software product called TI 15.4 Stack SimpleLink SDK Plugin. Which enables adding 15.4 stack capabilities to host MCUs like MSP432E4 ethernet MCU, or the CC3220 Wi-Fi MCU, which are from SimpleLink.
And this allows developers to add the 15.4 stack to our IP-connected products, whether that be internet or Wi-Fi.
Yes.
Awesome.
That's true.
And from an industrial aspect, why is that important? Why would users want to have cloud connectivity to sub-gigahertz connected edge nodes?
So we have noticed that a lot of our customers are using TI 15.4 stack network using Sub-1 technologies. And these are very widely used in the industrial space, and with the IOT training a lot in the industrial area nowadays. This kind of helps the customer to manage the end nodes through the cloud, and avoids them from being directly exposed in the field.
Gotcha. And I guess this gives you the best of both worlds. You get the cloud activity through either our internet products or our Wi-Fi products. But then you also have the low power benefits of a sub-gigahertz network.
Yes. So just to expand a little bit on that, your end nodes don't have to have high end resources, like memory or SRAM, or even power consumption. So most of that can be delegated to the industrial gateway. And all the nodes do is just tackle one specific task, and then send it to the gateway, which will manage the network increase, which is, as we know, a lot more power-consuming, and requires more resources.
And also, we can add intelligence in the gateway. Like, if we want to have a local control for a thermostat, a sensor can sense the temperature data, and we can replicate that on the local gateway instead of going to the cloud.
Awesome. And these give developers some options. They can do maybe a little bit of preprocessing at the edge. Do a little bit more processing at the gateway. And then maybe even do further processing up in the cloud.
Yep.
Very cool.
That's exactly right. And I guess the 15.4 stack, that's a star topology.
Yes. So the software that we have released, which is the Ti 15.4 Stack Plugin, that is not adding any new features from the networking stack point of view. All it does is enables the host MCUs to talk to the CC1310 SimpleLink Sub-1 devices, which already run the stack.
Awesome. Cool. And I know you brought one of the engineers here today, Yu, to walk through a demo here today. So we'll go ahead and bring Yu in, and we'll see if this work in action.
All right.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Well, thanks for joining us, Yu. So Sai just walk us through the new 15.4 plugin that's being introduced in the SimpleLink platform. And he mentioned that you had a pretty cool demo here to show what that's capable of. You want to walk through a little bit of what we've got going on here?
Yeah, of course. So we have the SimpleLink MSP432E4 Ethernet MCU.
OK.
So it will be in combination with the SimpleLink CC13xx device, which will have sub-1 gigahertz capability to communicate with a sensor node right here.
OK.
And so the collection of these two devices will create what's known as a collector. And it will communicate with the sensor node to send data between the two devices. And this data will be transmitted via ethernet cable into the IBM cloud.
OK. Awesome.
So just to make sure I understand. So I guess right now, what we have here is kind of the middle of a potential star network. Today we have one edge node. But this could, I guess, extrapolate to encompass multiple nodes as well.
Yes.
And in your plugin, you guys are providing examples for both the collector, the cloud connected gateway, as well as the edge devices here.
Yes. That is correct.
OK. Very cool. And I guess from a demo perspective, what can the developer come to expect once they start running some of the examples inside of your software product?
Well, right now for this example specifically, we have the CC13xx device. It has an internal temperature sensor. So right, it's sending to the collector a temperature reading from the device. And it's sending it through the cloud, which can be visualized in the GUI.
OK. So we've got the GUI running on the phone here. So let's go ahead and open that up. Awesome. So this temperature here is actually coming from the temperature sensor at the edge node?
Yes, that is correct.
OK. Very cool. And I guess there's a couple of things going on. I know there are some benefits of the IBM cloud. It's using an MPPT interface, and that's kind of bridging that data it's collecting up to the cloud interface.
Yes.
Very cool. And it's a bidirectional communication? Is that right as well?
Yes, that is correct. So it is sending data over here. And the sensors going to send data back to the collector.
OK, gotcha. So to demonstrate the ability to influence the edge from the cloud, I guess that's why you've got this little toggle switch.
Yes.
OK. Cool. Well let's go ahead and give it a push and see what happens. See here? There we go. So toggling that switch sends a message from the IBM cloud to the gateway, and now the LED on the edge is turned off.
OK. So we can do it again. And we can keep an eye on this red LED here. And if I push that button, message from the cloud to the gateway, ultimately to the edge. And we should get a read LED here turning on shortly.
Awesome. So the LED turned on. And that's demonstrating bidirectional communications. So you've got sensor data from the edge going to the gate way up to the cloud for remote visualization. And then the ability to actually influence the edge through a bidirectional interaction. That's pretty cool.
So can you think of any use cases where this type of technology might be useful in an end product?
Yeah. So the sensor node-- --can act as a thermostat. So basically, in your home system where you have the AC running, you can monitor the temperatures in your home. And then that can be sensed via sub-1 gigahertz to your gateway, and then sent to the IBM cloud so you can visualize it on your phone. So you can monitor your house temperature at all times.
Very cool. And I can take it a step further, where you actually might have multiple sensors in multiple rooms within a home or a building. And I guess at that point, you could do, maybe, further analytics. Take the average of all those temperatures and influence the temperature of your system that way.
Yes.
It's really, really cool. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Yu, for walking us through this demo. Can you talk a little bit about where users can get started?
Yeah. So on TI.com, we have the SimpleLink Academy ready. Or, the sub-1 gigahertz 15.4 stack. So users can go on there and start learning about it and using our devices. And it would be using the TI SDK 15.4 stack plugin, which will be on top of the MSP432E4 Ethernet MCU SDK.
Awesome. Very cool. Well, thank you very much, Yu. And thanks to Sai for hanging out with us today. Really excited. Definitely check out this SimpleLink plugin. It's an additional plugin inside of our ecosystem to help developers take sensor data up to the cloud.
So thanks for watching. And be sure to tune in next week. We'll talk more about the SimpleLink platform. And be sure to follow us on Twitter at SensorToCloud, and feel free to send us any information or feedback that you might have for future episodes. Thanks for watching.
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Details

Date:
August 7, 2018

Join Sai and Yu from TI's apps team to see an industrial gateway demo, taking sensors that don't have access to the internet, all the way to the cloud with the new SimpleLink 15.4 stack plugin. The new stack enables adding the 15.4 stack to host MCU like the SimpleLink Ethernet MSP432E4 MCU or the SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC3220 wireless MCU (SoC). This new capability can help you manage end nodes through the cloud, capitalizing on the Wi-Fi cloud connectivity and low power advantage of a Sub-1 GHz network.